Interface preview
Your first conversation
1
Open Cortex and send a message
Go to cortex.foundation. Chat is what you land on, and the page greets you with Good morning, Good afternoon or Good evening.Type into the box labelled Ask anything, or pick an app below…, or click one of the example prompts such as Plan a 5-day trip to Tokyo. Press Enter, or use the Send message button. Shift and Enter together add a line instead of sending.One message can hold up to 50,000 characters. Past 600 characters of draft the composer starts showing how much of that you have used.
2
Watch the answer arrive
The page becomes a conversation without reloading, and the answer is written in front of you rather than appearing all at once.Along the way you may see a Thinking block that fills and then collapses to a line saying how long Cortex thought, and one-line rows for any tool it used, such as Searched the web. Numbered citations point at their source.To cut an answer short, press Stop responding or Escape. The card then reads Stopped, with Continue to pick the same answer back up and Regenerate to ask again from scratch.
3
Pick a model and a thinking level
Click the model chip under the box. It shows the name of the model in use, with no label in front of it.Choose Cortex 1 Mini or Cortex Teutonic-1. Both carry a PREVIEW badge, which is a maturity signal rather than a different service, and neither one depends on your plan. Under THINKING, pick Low, Medium or High; higher thinking spends more time before answering.The model belongs to the conversation and is fixed once the chat has started. To use a different one for a single message, open This message only; the chip then says the choice applies to your next message and that the session default is unchanged. To change the model for good, start a new chat.
4
Sign in to keep your work
Sign in with your Cortex account. Signing in raises your allowance and unlocks uploads, projects, memory, plans and web search, all of which a guest does not have.
5
Attach a file
Choose Attach a file, then pick a file from your computer, From your Library, or Cloud drives (a drive you have not connected yet shows Connect).The chip shows an uploading percentage and then the file name. The stated ceiling is 10 MB max, and anything larger is refused in your browser before it is uploaded, so you do not wait for a failure. The same button that removes a file cancels an upload that is still running.Send the message. The file stays in your Library afterwards, and when an answer quotes it the citation names the file and the place inside it, like a page number or a sheet name.
6
File the thread in a project
Open More chat actions in the conversation header and choose Move to project, then pick one. A toast confirms with Moved to the project, and Remove from project puts it back. Projects carry standing instructions that every chat inside them starts from. See Projects.From the same menu, Start a plan turns the conversation into a checklist. The plan stays linked to the conversation and outlives it if you delete the chat.
Good first prompts
What a guest can and cannot do
You can hold a real conversation without an account. The sidebar shows how many free messages you have left.
Higher plans raise or remove the message allowance. See Plans and quotas and Accounts and sign-in. Anything that needs an account answers with a plain refusal and a Sign in action rather than failing silently.
Three shortcuts worth learning now
Related
- Conversations - edit, branch, pin, archive and search your threads.
- Models and thinking - the model chip and the thinking levels in detail.
- Attachments and files - accepted file types and how they are read.
- How Chat works - what happens inside a turn.
- Chat troubleshooting - what a message on screen is telling you.